


The Unexpected Twist

by Anonymous



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Dean thinks Sam Has Had A Stroke, Emotionally Hurt Dean Winchester, Emotionally Hurt Sam Winchester, Evil Chuck Shurley, Gen, Hurt Sam Winchester, Incontinence, Non-Consensual Infantilism, Protective Castiel (Supernatural), Protective Dean Winchester, Team Free Will (Supernatural), Team Free Will Are Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-24
Updated: 2019-11-24
Packaged: 2021-02-18 17:15:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21547726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Chuck finds a way to torment Sam through the wound Sam inflicted on them both, and he is cruel and merciless.Dean is left trying to care for Sam, trying to look after them both, trying to push through.But Chuck forgets that sometimes, stories write themselves no matter what the author intends.
Relationships: Castiel & Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 2
Kudos: 109
Collections: Supernatural Anon Kink Meme





	The Unexpected Twist

**Author's Note:**

> Some additional content warning, dear ones: Sam loses all bodily autonomy in this, and is left completely dependent on Dean. Dean is not immune to Chuck’s manipulation, either, and at one point Chuck has him considering if Sam might want to be put out of his suffering, but Dean realises this is Chuck’s intent.

The wound is still there. 

He...well, he supposes calling it that isn’t accurate, because it isn’t bleeding, or infected, and he hasn’t had to put a dressing on it in days.

But it hasn’t closed over either. It looks like a very over-enthusiastic piercing, if he was going to wear a bolt of some kind through his shoulder, and even though he knows he should check it frequently, the only time he sees it is by accident, when he’s shaving or drying off after a shower or getting undressed while he’s half asleep and his eyes glance over it.

He feels a little sick when he does see it, can’t help but wonder if it means something, the way it isn’t healing like a normal bullet wound would.

But of course it isn’t a normal bullet wound, and even as he doesn’t tell Dean it’s still there, like a tunnel dug into his shoulder, he can’t deny the little voice in his head that says nothing good is going to come of it.

And, while he suspects the little voice is right, all he can do is wait.

It’s not like Cas is here (thanks, Dean) to try and heal it, or help ward off any consequences from it, or even just offer advice and support.

So, come what may. They’ll handle it or push through anyway.

That’s what they do.

++

Dean isn’t a fool. He raised Sam, and he knows when his little brother is keeping something from him. Sam has tells he doesn’t know realise, and over the years Dean’s used them to find out about first kisses, stolen lunches, a few run ins with teachers, a puppy hidden in the bathroom, and other more serious things.

There’s been a few times Sam’s successfully managed to hide serious shit, but mostly Dean knows.

Like now.

That wound, from the gun, is still bothering him. He can tell from how Sam _doesn’t_ talk about it, and doesn’t rub his shoulder, or take any painkillers (even a normal bullet wound, if closed over, would still be bothering him a little especially with how cold it can get in the bunker; Dean’s got his own scars and they can throb like a bitch).

Sam is avoiding it, and the subject, and he wouldn’t be doing that unless there was something there to avoid.

But Sam isn’t going to talk to him about it, and the couple of times Dean tries, in a roundabout way, to bring it up, Sam dodges and redirects and he’s damn good at it, leaving Dean no choice but to fall back and wait for another opportunity.

Sort of pinning Sam down and yanking open his shirt, what else can he do? 

Maybe...maybe the wound is fine, Sam just needs some time to get over the fact that he tried to kill God and got slammed down by some kind of fucked up karma.

Maybe it’s not just that, but this whole thing, everything that’s happened.

Hell, Dean knows he’s not doing so great either, especially since a certain angel walked out the door.

It feels like their family’s being whittled down one member at a time, but that last one….yeah, he held the knife there, but he never intended for Cas to go.

Right now, though...right now, he has to help Sam, somehow, or at least figure out if Sam needs his help or if he just needs time.

++

It’s two days later when it starts.

Sam’s coming down the stairs, muscles jangling after his run, and he blames it on that, but he’s three steps from the bottom when he kind of wobbles and loses his footing and crashes the rest of the way down.

Dean was in the library, luckily enough, and comes running. He finds Sam on his ass on the floor, carefully prodding a nasty gash in his knee between the torn fabric edges of his sweatpants.

“Shit, Sam, that’s gonna need stitches. What happened?”

Sam lets Dean help him up. “Guess I ran a little further than I usually do. Tired myself out.”

He rests on Dean as his brother helps him through to the infirmary, gets him on one of the beds, and then cleans and stitches up the wound.

Maybe he just needs to take it a little easier for a while; get his feet back under him physically, mentally and emotionally.

Except they don’t have time. Chuck is out there, planning what they don’t know, and he doesn’t need to sleep. He doesn’t need to get his feet back under him.

Time is what they don’t have.

So, like Winchesters do, he pushes it back until there is time (if this isn’t the final battle, the one they can’t win, in which case it won’t matter anyway) and ducks his head and marches on.

Until the next day, when he realises that maybe there is actually something wrong with him.

++

He wakes up when it’s still the middle of the night, spends a few bleary moments trying to figure out why, did he hear something, was it his cell, or Dean calling out for him.

But none of the above.

He’s...wet.

Fuck, did he tear open the stitches in his knee? But it wasn’t that big a wound, not really, so even if he had somehow done that in his sleep and the wound had started to bleed again, he’d be dead if it had leaked out enough for his sheet and his pants to be this soaked.

He kicks the blankets back, and reaches down to pat at the wet patch and then stares at his hand. The liquid must be clear because even in the low light spilling into his room from the hall, he can see his skin isn’t stained.

Warily, he sniffs at his palm and makes a grossed out sound.

It’s urine.

He’s pissed himself.

Fuck.

Face hot with shame, Sam gets up, and peels off his clothes. He needs to shower, and this means padding bare ass down the hall, but Dean’s not likely to be awake at this time (Sam knows he’s been taking a nightcap or two or three before trying to turn in and it’s not a great idea, but he can’t grudge it to his brother, not with things how they are) and even if he is, living in each other’s pockets as they have done for years, they’ve both seen everything the other one has.

He grabs his soiled clothes and pads down to the bathroom, and dumps his laundry in the hamper before turning on the shower, and climbing in once the water’s hot.

It feels good, draining the tension out of him, and he soaps himself up (as best he can around his knee, the gash nipping), and his body is singing with need as his fingers glide across his skin.

It’s been a while, and he’s quick, panting hard as he works himself over, and then his body’s like it’s been twisted up and wrung out, and his muscles are noodle limp.

He rinses himself off, eases out of the shower and grabs a big towel to dry off with.

He steers clear of the mirror, not wanting anything to ruin his chill, and then wraps the towel around his waist to head back to his room.

He changes the sheets, dumps them in the corner for tomorrow (can’t figure out how he forget to take them with him to the bathroom) and then climbs naked under the covers; getting back into sleepwear would take energy he doesn’t have and he’s already almost under.

He doesn’t wake up until he hears Dean knocking on his door the next morning, telling him breakfast is up.

++

Dean eyes him as Sam stumbles into the kitchen, and dumps himself in a chair.

“You okay? Because you look like shit, Sammy.”

Sam grunts, and waves his brother off. Dean lets it go, for now, because he can’t exactly call bullshit without being a hypocrite, and bowls up some oatmeal for Sam, with little pieces of cubed apple and cinnamon spice, and a cup of OJ, and brings it over.

His eggs are cooking, but he wants to make sure Sam eats; his little brother is usually already up and dressed and, apparently, fed by the time Dean rouses himself.

Except now he’s starting to wonder if Sam is actually taking care of himself. He doesn't look like he is, but then it’s not too long since he shot God and got him hit by the backlash, so maybe Dean’s just expecting (hoping for) too much.

He sits down, watching Sam take tiny sips of the juice, and then reach for his spoon.

He fumbles it, fingers closing clumsily over the handle and only managing to push it away.

“Sam?”

Sam huffs at him, and then tries again, but it’s like his fingers don’t remember how to work, properly; Dean sees them trying to curve, to grip, but they can’t get it right.

When Sam looks at him, there’s genuine fear there. “Dean?”

“Okay, Sam, Sam, look at me? It’s okay, alright? Just look at me.”

Sam does, and Dean doesn’t want to voice the concern in his head, because Sam’s too young for that (even though he knows there’s never an age where it can’t happen) and he gets Sam to stick his tongue out, move it from side to side, to smile, to raise his arms, and he can do all of that).

He just can’t grab a spoon, which could mean anything from a trapped nerve to arthritis (unlikely, he’s never heard of sudden onset arthritis in his life but he’s grasping at every straw he can here) to the more obvious explanation because the hand that’s crapped out on him is the same side as the one that got hit by the magical ricochet.

But he can still use his other hand, perfectly, and eating the oatmeal is awkward (and the appetite for food is suddenly gone for both of them) but Dean coaxes him into it anyway while he tries not to panic.

++

Sam can tell when Dean’s scared and hiding it. 

Hell, he’s scared right then, because he knows he isn’t having a stroke (like Dean, he knows the signs) but this doesn’t feel like a trapped nerve either.

Something is wrong with him. In two days, he’s fallen down the stairs, suffered urinary incontinence and now lost fine motor skills in his hand.

He’s feeling under siege, waiting on the next thing, and as he pages through the book on magical curses (not really what they can class the effects of shooting Chuck as, but it’s as close as they can come) he thinks again about praying to Cas.

It made him feel better to know Cas wasn’t ignoring his messages; Sam had heard chirping near the bunker the first morning he’d taken a run after the angel had upped and left.

It was Cas’s phone, dumped in the dirt, but now it means they have no way of contacting him, and no way of knowing if prayers are even getting through.

But he does anyway, tells Cas he hopes he’s okay, and...if he could come home.

He wants to offload, tell Cas he’s hurt and scared, but he doesn’t want to guilt Cas. He knows something was said between him and Dean, and he can imagine, and as badly as he needs Cas then, he won’t manipulate him into returning.

Cas has to return on his own terms, and Sam suspects it will need to be Dean who deals with that, if there ever is to be a return, but it’s very hard not to beg.

He realises that when, if, Cas return, and finds out Sam didn’t tell him what happened, he’d be severely chided by the angel and then probably hugged a lot, but it doesn’t change the fact that right now, they’re going to have to deal with this alone.

He finds out exactly what they’re dealing with five chapters on. The text is old and faded, but he can make out enough to know what’s been happening, and he pushes the book over to his brother.

“Son of a bitch,” Dean says. 

Sam doesn’t know why Dean seems shocked; it should probably have been the first thing they thought of. Well, they kind of did, that this was related to the bullet wound, but they could never have imagined it was like this.

That it provided a sympathetic channel for Chuck to work over, an extra set of puppet strings for him to pull on as he lurched Sam all over the place.

Twisted and turned him, and pulled him into knots.

The only thing it doesn’t tell them is how to cut Sam loose.

++

The problem, as Dean sees it, is that there’s no way to protect Sam from Chuck. Whatever this magical link the bullet wound has created, there’s no way to block or sever it. It’s getting through the wards, already at maximum, and even through the magic circles Dean casts around his little brother, like they were kids’ doodles on the ground.

Times like this an angel and a witch would have come in handy, but they have neither, anymore, and Dean pushes away a swell of hurt because that won’t help and it won’t change anything.

They have what they have, and it’s not going to be enough.

By nightfall, Sam can’t stand up anymore, and he’s struggling to say Dean’s name.

There’s an old wheelchair in the infirmary (the last person to use it was Cas, in fact, when he’d gotten busted up for them and had taken such a knock that he’d needed a few days to fully recover) and Dean uses it to get Sam to his, Dean’s room.

He sits up to watch, half dozing, but never going under enough that he isn’t keeping watch.

Maybe four hours after that Sam becomes fully incontinent, and he can only babble at Dean as Dean cleans him up, and starts to realise what’s happening.

Chuck isn’t going to kill Sam. He’s going to take away from him what he values most: his sense of agency, of self control, because he knows.

He knows what’s happened to Sam in the past, he knows Sam’s greatest fear, and he’s going to use it to torture him because Sam dared to act against him.

As Dean tucks a towel around and between Sam’s legs, the best he can do short term, his eyes fall on the wound: open, watching him like some kind of evil eye.

He hopes that wherever Chuck is now, he’s in just as much pain as Sam is, suffering just as much, and that it never stops.

If there’s any justice in the world, this shit should run both ways, but Dean’s long since given up on expecting the world to be fair.

++

The thing Chuck’s hates most about writing is characters who won’t play ball. He isn’t one of those writers who ‘go where the story takes them.’

No. The writer crafts the story; it’s his world, and he makes the rules, he drives the narrative, and any character or situation or even a line of dialogue that doesn’t work, doesn’t do what _he_ wants…

Well, that’s why they have the backspace key.

Except those damned Winchesters. If he knew then what he knows now, he’d just have written them out, but it’s all gone too far for that.

He can still manipulate, do some meagre re-writes, but it isn’t enough, and when he realised he had another way to influence, to change the story, he jumped at it.

But again, it hasn’t gone like he wanted. Those brothers keep bucking the plot, because by now…

By now, Sam should have become so much of a burden to Dean, be in such a sorry state (he has become that much of a burden, Chuck knows it) that Dean should have been more than ready to do the right thing by his brother and put him out of his misery.

He’d written a moving scene, if he does say so himself, a single tear rolling down Sam’s cheek as he tries to tell Dean it’s okay, he doesn’t want to continue like this, and Dean cries too, and grabs the pillow, and…

But it’s been two weeks, now, and those fucking brothers are still co-authoring his damn work, resisting his tweaks, and if he still had the power Chuck would write in a meterorite hitting their damned bunker and taking them both out of the game completely.

But he doesn’t, and the only power he does have (or thought he did) doesn’t seem enough to take back control.

At least, though, he can still make them suffer, and that will keep him entertained for a while.

++

Dean figures Sam’s still in there.

He figures his mind’s the same age as his body, and that both kills him and gives him hope at the same time.

Because it means he can treat this like an illness or an injury or a curse, and find a way to fix it, which he maybe wouldn’t be able to if Sam had regressed mentally to a baby.

But it also means Sam knows every moment of what’s happening to him, trapped in a situation he can’t get out of, and all Dean can do is promise him he’ll find a way to make this all right.

As he bathes Sam, and feeds him, and changes him (he knew adult diapers were a thing but he never expected to be actually using one, and definitely never on his brother). 

Sam’s size makes all of the above difficult, and Dean’s the wrong side of forty to be heaving a man of his brother’s build around, but he manages.

He does what he can to keep Sam distracted, putting on history documentaries, and his favourite kind of movies, but sometimes he looks at Sam and just knows how much he’s suffering in there.

This...losing control of himself like this, having it _taken_ , being made a prisoner in his own body, he knows this is Sam’s greatest fear, and sometimes he can feel like Sam’s telling him he’s had enough.

There’s a pull towards the inevitable, because Sam isn’t going to get better. Dean can’t fix this, and he can’t save his little brother, but he can do one thing for him, and he feels like Sam wants him to.

After all, Sam had had enough before, and wanted to go, and Dean pulled him back.

Maybe he owes Sam this, helping him finally be free.

Or maybe that’s what Chuck wants. 

His twisted end to the Winchesters’ story.

Dean wonders how it is that Chuck’s been writing them for decades and still doesn’t know them.

Because he loves his brother, but they’re fighters, and he knows for a fact that if Sam living on another moment pisses Chuck off, Sam will choose to keep living.

He didn’t give ground to Lucifer, and the moment he found out about Gadreel, he kicked that fucker out as well.

This is no different, and Dean will keep wiping Sam’s ass until he dies himself before he’ll check Sam out as part of Chuck’s fucked up narrative.

Even if he’s too tired to stand up anymore, and his vision blurs as he makes up baby safe meals to carefully spoon feed into his little brother’s mouth and can’t remember the last time he slept more than an hour in a go.

So he thinks, when he hears the bunker door open, that it’s a sleep deprivation induced hallucination, but then Cas is standing in front of him, looking like his heart is going to break, and he holds steady as Dean slumps into his arms.

The last thing Dean hears before exhaustion puts him under is Cas telling him it’ll be alright.

++

“I didn’t get any of your prayers,” Cas says.

He’s settling Sam back gently on the bed (Dean’s carpentry skills came in useful when he made up a couple of frames for either side that could be dropped and raised, and were just high enough to stop Sam tumbling over the sides) and ran his fingers through Sam’s hair before covering him up.

“It wasn’t until Chuck did this that they started to come through. I think he was blocking them, but when Sam was no longer able to communicate he let that slip.”

Dean’s nursing a coffee as he watches Cas tend to Sam. “Is he still…”

“Praying?” Cas nods, and squeezes hold of Sam’s hand. “Yes. He says to tell you whatever you put in the apple purée earlier tastes like boiled socks.”

Dean huffs out a laugh. “Oh, I guess I’ll need to figure out how to mash down lettuce and egg whites, huh.”

Cas sits down between them both, and reaches out for Dean with his other hand.

The last time someone took Dean’s hand in comfort was when Mary was with Ketch and Sam was off leading an attack on the Letters’ HQ, and everything was falling apart and Dean couldn’t do a damn thing to stop it.

Jody had been there, and Cas was too, and Dean took his hand and he held on.

“I think we can fix this,” Cas says, “but it’s risky, and it may not work.”

Dean squeezes his hand around Cas’s, firm, determined. Isn’t that all of their plans, risky, and with the potential of failure, but they make them work, somehow, in the end?

His words to Cas come back to him, then, and he wishes he could swallow them back down, but once this is done, he’ll make things right with the angel.

“If Sam’s willing to try…”

Cas glances once at Sam, and then nods. “He is.”

“Then let’s do it.”

++

Amara generally prefers radio silence where the angels and her brother are concerned.

Since there are hardly any angels left, the former isn’t a problem; the only one she would imagine having the courage to communicate with her anyway would be her nephew, Castiel, and given their history, she imagines he’d rather rip his own wings out than do so.

Which is fine.

But even though she generally tunes Chuck out, sometimes he’s powerful enough (annoying enough) to push through, and so she finds herself appearing inside the bolt hole he’s secured for himself now that everything is turning in on him.

What she finds is not what she expected, and she studies him carefully as she fathoms it out.

And then she laughs. The humans would call it irony, or poetic justice.

She can see what her brother tried to do, so sure of himself, that he could impose his control on his main characters, and look where it’s left him.

Outmanoeuvred and undone.

Amara crouches down next to him, and he kicks his legs and babbles up at her, speech now beyond his voice, but she can hear him in her head all the same.

Begging for help, for her to get him out of this situation. One that, unlike her own eons before, is entirely of his own making.

She could turn around and leave him.

It’s no more than what he deserves, his own malign influence bounced back at him by his own son, and she can sense the block Castiel’s put in place along the channel her brother has been using to torment Sam Winchester.

She suspects she knows how, and what it cost, and wonders if her brother knows that his fledgling is a better creature than he could ever hope to be.

But she is also, and she remembers what Dean Winchester told her when her brother’s death was about to take the world with it.

Of course, helping him will undo his nasty little plot line, and she warns him of this.

She’s not surprised when he tells her he doesn’t care.

The Winchesters, all three of them, they understand personal sacrifice.

But they’re strong, whereas her brother…

Isn’t.

Amara lays her hands on him, and unpicks the damage done by the weapon, and then undoes the cruelty it allowed her brother to inflict.

Will he try it again? Probably, and she has no intentions of hanging around to intervene.

But she knows what it’s like to be ganged up on, and overpowered, and that she can do something about.

++

Human.

Sam isn’t sure what to do or say. 

At least now he can do and say things, but it’s only because of Cas.

Cas giving up the last of his Grace to repay what Chuck had done to him; sending the malign influence back along the channel between Sam and his dad so that he experienced the same effects.

It was something Chuck probably wasn’t expecting, since he thought Cas had left the Winchesters’ story for good, but then he didn’t know Cas.

And, for all he’d written, he didn’t know them either.

But it had left him one option: suffer with Sam or end it. 

Now, Sam’s watching as Dean puts a plate of food in front of Cas.

He’s wearing a pair of Dean’s jeans, and one of his tee-shirts, and he looks...softer, somehow, like there was a torment in him that’s been lifted.

Maybe this was how Cas was always meant to be, but Sam knows he’ll never forget will Cas gave up for him, and never stop thinking of him as angel.

Of course, it might be more to do with something else, and Dean reaches across to ruffle Cas’s hair playfully, and the angel tsks him, and runs a hand through to try and tidy it up again.

It doesn’t help.

That’s when the bunker alarms go off.

They’re on their feet, all three of them, grabbing guns and angel blades, and turning to face the door as it swings open and Amara descends towards them.

She smirks at their battle ready stances, and then a wave of her hand puts Sam and Dean in their seats and keeps them there.

She closes on Cas and he doesn’t flinch, stands his ground, even though his aunt hurt him brutally once.

“I like a fair fight,” she says, simply, and then she kisses Cas gently on the forehead.

She looks to them, and says, “And you two should probably close your eyes.”

Wind picks up in the bunker, like a storm swelling to fill the room. There’s a brilliant glow emanating from where Cas and Amara are standing, so brilliantly bright that they can see it with their eyes closed, and then when it’s gone, and they look again, so is Amara.

But Cas is standing there, looked down at himself, face stunned.

They can get up again, and they run to him.

“Cas?”

Cas shuts his eyes, and the air behind him shimmers and then the most incredible set of black wings appear, stretched nearly the width and of the room, reaching half way to the ceiling.

When he looks at them again, his eyes are shining with power.

Dean can’t seem to find any words, while Sam can and he stares in astonishment at their friend.

“Cas….are you an angel again?”

He sees a hint of red colour Cas’s cheeks and he pulls them both into his arms, wraps his wings around them. 

“I think….more.”


End file.
